Welcome to the Immersive Experiences (IX) Working Group repository! Here you can find infos, minutes and slides of the previous presentations.
We are a group of (mostly) MAT PhD students working in various areas ranging from sound processing to cognitive science. Everyone is welcome to join.
The IX Working Group aim is to meet and discuss topics/news/issues/WIP related to Virtual Reality and 3D Sound. Every meeting someone from the group present their work, sometimes to gather feedback, sometimes to share knowledge. We don't take a rigid seminar-like structure but a more informal approach to content sharing. Occasionally we invite guest speakers to present their research.
We meet every 1st Wednesday of the month in room G2 (Performance Lab, Engineering building) 11:00 - 12:00.
- December 2019 12th meeting
- November 2019 11th meeting
- October 2019 10th meeting
- April 2019 9th meeting (Guest Talk: Prof. Antonia Hamilton)
- February 2019 8th meeting
- December 2018 7th meeting
- October 2018 6th meeting
- July 2018 5th meeting
- June 2018 4th meeting
- April 2018 3rd meeting
- March 2018 2nd meeting
- February 2018 First meeting
Carlos presented his research on Qualitative Exploration of VR Games Control Schemes Customisation using Interactive Machine Learning. He discussed games control, sensors interaction and user experience in VR gaming. He also presented his Interactml (interactive machine learning framework for Unity). Carlos's slides can be found here
Shivani presented her past and current research on Effort and Sense of Embodiment in VR. She discussed presence, physical effort and agency. She also discussed her last study design on virtual flying with various degrees of physical effort required. Shivani's slides can be found here
Guest speaker Jeffrey Ferguson (personal page), Lecturer and researcher, in charge of XR at Westminister University, presented his previous works adn experience as well as his lab and the projects they do with students.
Francesco presented his experimental design for his first study on The role of haptic feedback in the perception of motion in Virtual Reality. He presented the design and discussed the potential limitations and/or issues that could arise. Francesco's presentation can be found here
Thomas Deacon. presented a tutorial/technical talk: using "Lab Streaming Layer" to collect synchronised data in VR experiments
Rishi presented a summary of his research to date on Binaural virtual auditory display for music content recommendation and navigation. He took a tour through some of the issues, approaches and findings that he's encountered so far in developing an interactive environment founded principally on 3D audio. This included demonstration of a novel and computationally lightweight approach to rendering head-tracked binaural auditory scenes.
Rishi's presentation can be found here.
Francesco presented his PhD topic: Sound and Haptics to Represent Motion in VR. His proposed research aims to explore crossmodal mappings between sound and haptics, in particular vibrotactile feedback. These two stimuli will be used to test motion illusion (also called Vection) in Virtual Reality applications. In particular the aim is to analyse the user experience within virtual reality applications in terms of movement and different types of locomotion (e.g. linear, point-to-point, variable speed).
Francesco's presentation can be found here.
Tom G talked about designing a study versus designing a game, presenting the evolution of his system and method for testing models of listeners non-verbal responses. The talk highlighted the problems he encountered from using a game-like environment for his studies and the plans to overcome them in the future.
Tom's presentation can be found here.
We discussed the next VR equipment purchase, managed by Liang.
Finnaly, we voted on a new name for the group to represent our interest in VR, AR, and 3D audio. From now on we are the Immersive Experiences working group.
Vivek presented his first study design which focuses on modelling player experience in Augmented Reality Mobile Games. His study explores the relationship between a player's behaviour (measured through sensors data) in a game and the player's preferences to different level designs. Vivek's slides are here.
We also discussed the possibility to visit the Digital Catapult next month instead of a VR SIG meeting. TBC.
Discussion forwarded ideas for
- Guidelines on using teleportation in social VR
- Alternate methods of teleporation using locomotion of avatar in the scene
- When teleporting into each other in VR, features could be designed to allow preference of body-space similar to proxemics, you can decide how close people get.
- how understanding the controllers change behaviour when using devices, faster cycles between teleport jumps
- Ethics: Suggestion to start a page on the noticeboard repo collating discourses on long-term effects and ethical questions on the use of VR.
- Reality blurring: Link to paper on exiting VR, from an experience design perspective
- Harassment in VR: and upcoming online event in High Fidelity challenging it by discussing inclusive behaviour
- Harassment in VR: Negative effect of gamification making bad behaviour a fun thing, it is important to have consequences in online embodied interaction spaces.
- Identity: Body image and ownership
- Reality blurring: UCL Andrew Burn - Study of children not separating realities
- Asymmetric VR - Bailenson study on everyone being in the front seat
- Idea to explore zero-gravity social interaction in VR
- Accord is a .NET machine learning framework that you can easily integrate into unity.
- When building the unity project the content of the resources folder will be compiled into the project, not being available in the Resources folder. To bypass this problem use the lower level File.IO tools that are provided with c# and not the higher level CSV writer and reader. In other words, if you want to load a file that is not in the Resources folder when building the project (ie: generated in run time), you will need to load it using File.IO resources, not CsvReader or similar classes.
- AppleScript can save you a lot of headaches if you want to interact with another app in Mac (this is not related to ML but a useful tip i think).
Slides, link may break in time.
Key makeaway, think about what features you would like to be able to prototype easily and Tom will try to integrate them into Klak. Currently working on porting toxiclibs to C#, then will create wiring containers for Klak.
Slides and the slides for Tom G's talk "Hacking networking solutions for common problems".